“Heaven is under the feet of mothers” says the veiled teacher in Arabic telling us, students, the prophets words; in attempt to exemplify the importance of motherhood and illustrate the reward God will give these good mothers for all the suffering. This particular teacher goes on to say, “Except for Nelly’s mother; because she is Christian.” As a six year old sitting in a religious education class at the King Fahad Academy in 1986, England, I remember being horrified as I, with the big imagination I had, imagined my most loved mother walking on that thin rope they told us you had to cross between hell and heaven – and not making it to the other side… It is, no doubt the same thing my sister felt, 15 years later from the Egyptian Saturday school teacher, also in London, who said the same thing. We both had nightmares of the…

Blog posts by the New Misogynists I write about here often seem to be little more than combinations and recombinations of a relatively small number of very bad ideas. Today, let’s look at a blog post from a “conservative libertarian” and creepy Nice Guy ™ who identifies himself only as TIC, which combines a bit of “consent is hard” and “women only like bad boys” with some muddled notions from Evo Psych to conclude that women are such mysterious creatures that no one could possibly know what they really want — and so therefore it’s women who are the ones who are really responsible when they get raped.

Hobson holds up a different sort of atheist thinker from those that brought you the literary success of The God Delusion and God is not Great. That of Alain de Botton who stresses the religious roots of secular humanism, and the human condition that benefits from rituals and community.

Thing is these ideas already existed before that – Sea of Faith stresses the human creation of religion but welcomes people of all faiths that value the practise and heritage in the 1980s. It started from a book, TV programmes to gathering of like minded thinkers.

Now for those of you that would like to do something a little more positive & constructive than dance on her grave, then please visit this wonderful site my lovely friend Alex set up precisely to try & help those that were devastated by Thatcher’s policies

nor is the bitch.
A woman died. One whose politics I despise, then and now, one who was no friend to feminism, who called the ANC terrorists, and divided the country like none since (though Osborne is doing a good job trying).
But when we buy into the language of hate (witch) or the language of misogyny (bitch) all we do is collude with a woman who believed there was no such thing as society, that it was each of us for ourselves. A woman who promoted just one woman in all her time in power and who perceived feminism to be a poison.
We’re better than that. And our language should be better as well.
We also give her, and her bitter legacy, the oxygen of publicity. Let’s not.

These days, well-behaved African heads of state are rewarded by Barack Obama with the chance to meet with him in groups of four and have their picture taken with him. It’s like meeting Beyonce, but you get to call it a state visit. That’s what happened on Friday when Malawi’s Joyce Banda, Senegal’s Macky Sall, Cape Verde’s José Maria Neves and Sierra Leone’s Ernest Bai Koroma were paraded before the White House press corps, sitting in star-struck silence as Barack reeled off a kind of wikipedia-level roll-call of their accomplishments. They beamed like competition winners. It was all very feudal.